Tanabicom

Android Rooting: Rooting a Samsung Moment

First off, a little "Why?" before I get into the how...

I gotta say, when it comes to my personal data devices -- be it laptops, music players, or phones -- I demand a fairly good deal of control over what shows up on it. That being said, I'm not a hacker type. I don't live, breathe, and eat sticking it to the man for the sake of sticking it to the man.

In fact, I don't particularly like the idea of rooting a phone. It means voiding the waranty, it means making future updates harder, and it could have other consequences. Those consequences include, but are not limited to, accidently rendering my shiney new phone into a door stop and possibly losing service with my phone provider. After all, once you root a phone, you can tell by looking under the "about" screens of the phone. I would not be surprised if my phone provider at some point said screw-you to all the rooters and somehow mass deactivated us.

That being said, my rights were strongly infringed upon. In fact, I would say in a very Anti-Trust kind of way. Can we learn something from Microsoft, people? Bundling software and requiring you to have it can lead to trouble. If the public gets upset enough -- or for that matter the competition gets upset enough -- it could turn into lawsuits.

Of course, I'm no lawyer, I could be and probably am wrong. But still! It pisses me off when my brand new phone has software I can't uninstall. Let me take you through the point-by-point:

My phone came with a demo of Bejeweled. I actually like Bejeweled, it's a fun game and I owned it on my old phone. I might buy it someday for this phone if the mood strikes. However, I could not uninstall Bejeweled, and that pissed me off on several levels. For one, I just don't want to have a demo that expires permenently wedged on my phone. For two, I have no confidence that if I purchased the game, the demo icon would go away. In fact, I'm pretty sure if I purchased the game I would be stuck with two Bejeweled icons. Not an encouragement to buy -- I'd actually be pretty mad if I were EA right about now!
My phone came with a number of sports related feeds and icons that I couldn't get rid of. Note that this phone is very easy to fat finger things. Nothing makes me more angry than fat-fingering onto something that I didn't want installed on the first place. These things are just landmines.
Some of the applications really stink. MoxierMail, for example, is terrible. I tried to set up my Exchange ActiveSync using it, but it just would hang ... I wound up getting a different program to do it, but I can't uninstall the old one.
And finally, some applications you can't turn off and will always be memory resident unless you kill them with fire. Some of the sports components (the NASCAR one if I recall correctly) and the voice command program are like this. I didn't want any of that crap hogging my memory.

My phone provider imposed these things on my personal device, something I bought for my usage. It's a PERSONAL DATA ASSISTANT, not PHONE PROVIDER'S PROGRAM INJECTOR. So, in the interest of feeling good about my purchase, I had to root the phone. And in doing so, I was able to remove all these things.

So, how do you do it?

WARNING! THE FOLLOWING INSTRUCTIONS SHOULD NOT BE FOLLOWED BY ANYBODY. THIS IS A REALLY BAD IDEA. IF YOU DO THIS, YOU DO IT OF YOUR OWN FREE WILL. TANABICOM, LLC AND ITS PERSONELL ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY DAMAGE YOU DO TO YOUR PHONE BY YOUR OWN ACTIONS

That being said... how likely are you to damage your phone? Not very. You're just as likely to damage your phone by doing this as you would by flashing an authorized ROM update. Fact of the matter is, there is ALWAYS some risk in flashing the ROM. You could lose power, a truck could plow through the wall and run over your computer, you could turn into an being of pure energy and EMP the whole process. The difference is, that if you damage your phone in the course of trying to root it, you'll be voiding your waranty.

If they can prove what you're doing. Ignorance is bliss. :)

Anyway, I went around and I tried to find rooting instructions. The problem is, most people who do this kind of thing are pretty experienced with it. The instructions are scary and you may not know what's going on. I'm going to try and make instructions for other people who really don't know the ins and outs of how things work.

That being said, close this web browser window now if you're not a skilled UNIX admin. Once you have rooted your phone, you will be dealing with a miniature, stripped down Linux device. Unless you know what you're doing with it, you will destroy it. This guide doesn't teach you how to be a Linux admin, this guide just shows you how to flash the ROM in a relatively safe fashion.

Without further adu... This guide assumes you have a Sprint phone. I won't admit to whether or not I have one, this is purely for entertainment purposes.

Back up your phone. I didn't do this because mine was brand new and I had nothing to back up. I can't help you here. If your stuff is all sync'd I don't think it matters much.
Install Sprint's Update tool.

Go Here and grab the updater. This is just a generic push firmware to your phone application, but it's a little wonky.

You need version "CL14" of your firmware in order to root it. However, I suggest you apply this update regardless of what version of the firmware is on your phone; it's a good "dry run", it will show you through the process and it will let Windows install the driver that it needs to flash your phone. Note that this will remove all the data on your phone.

So -- run the updator and follow the steps. Note that in the middle you will need to install a driver; this threw me for a loop when I did it because the driver install window showed up under the flasher application window. I actually went through the whole thing and wondered why the flash wasn't working until I finally noticed I had another window open underneith. Just so there's no surprises, this is what you're going to see:
1. Make bloody well sure your phone has a full battery. Seriously. I'm not sure what happens if you do this and you run out of battery along the way, but I wouldn't want to find out. Would you? No? Didn't think so!
2. It will ask you to remove your battery and do a funky key combination to bring your phone into download mode. Note that you should leave your phone unplugged from USB while doing this; you can only enter download mode if your phone is unplugged.
3. Next it will ask you to plug your phone into windows and let windows detect it. It will ask you to install a driver. For me, it popped up the driver installation UNDER the window... Go ahead and install the driver. It will require your computer to reboot. It is safe to reboot your computer at this point -- it will not hurt your phone, you have not gotten to the flashing stage yet.
4. After you've rebooted, run the program again. Once again, take the battery out, put it back in, and enter download mode like the directions say. However, this time, proceed past the driver installation step. It will ask you AGAIN to take the battery out and enter download mode -- there is no need to do this, just keep hitting next until it takes you to the screen with the "Start" button. Hit "Start", cross your fingers .... and if it works you should have a CL14 updated phone!
At this point, you should now have Sprint's update tool installed and you should have had at least one successful flash. If your phone is a hockey puck, go get a replacement -- you have done nothing wrong!

Before we go further, let's understand a couple things about the flash utility and what you're going to install on your phone. Turns out that the flash utility can put files in a TAR (Tape ARchive) file onto your phone. By the way, if you don't know what a TAR file is, you probably shouldn't be rooting your phone; just saying! So most of these kernel installs involve actually putting TAR files on it. There's a number of things you can put on the phone in this fashion; the root-ed kernel for one, and other stuff like Max's Recovery which can be used to back up your phone to the SD-CARD. Most of these things actually don't harm the data on your phone. Pretty cool, right? I wish somebody told me that from the get-go!

So first off, register for this forum: sdx-developers. You're going to need to download some files from there. This wiki page gives you a list of available files. As of this writing (April 29, 2010) version 1.9.5 is the latest. Download the "tarball" link. You'll end up with a TAR file. This is your kernel.

If you want, also download Max's Recovery. You can get it here but please note that it is downloaded in 7Zip format. You will need a 7-Zip Extractor in order to uncompress it. DO NOT TRY TO FLASH A 7ZIP FILE!
To actually flash this file, you need to find where the Samsung Upgrade tool is installed, and more specifically where the update file is hiding. For most people this is probably:

C:\Program Files\Samsung Electronics\SWUpgrade\Models\Binary

Move the file that's in there already out; that's the stock flash file. Put it on your desktop or someplace safe. Put JoeyKrim's kernel .tar file in the Binary directory.

Run the SWUpdate flash program. Flash your phone just like you did with the stock update. Cross your fingers, and hopefully your phone will come up "rooted". You can check the Settings - About Phone - Build number and see joeykrim SDX Final 1.9.5 (or whatever version you used).

You're done! Play around with it to make sure it works. Grab ConnectBot off Android Market and pick 'local' instead of 'ssh' to get a command prompt and observe how 'su' now functions. Show your friends, impress your neighbors.
If you want Max's Recovery, take the .tar file out of the Binary directory and put Max's Recovery file in. You should be sure to unzip it first. Follow the flash procedure. This probably won't damage your phone's data or do anything bad.

To get into "Recovery Mode", pull your battery out, put it back in, then hold down Volumn Down, Green PhoneButton (call) and Red Phone Button (power). It'll start up. Use the little joystick nub thing to make selections and click the nub to perform actions. You can use this to backup, restore, and update your phone.
Want to get rid of those pesky apps? Check this forum post out.

Big thanks to SamsungMomentForum which is where I learned to do this. Their instructions are pretty good, though I didn't feel like I knew what was going on. And when you're dealing with a rather expensive toy, you really want to know what's going on!

Also thanks to sdx-developers who made this all possible.